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| | The most enchanting seduction need involve only the slightest of gestures. The new album from Laura
López Castro shows this can be true for music as well. These are songs that charm like a wonderful smile or a flirtatious look and they play around your ears with all the gentle magic of a breeze in high summer.
Laura López Castro y Don Philippe inventan el ser feliz (‘Laura López Castro and Don Philippe invent happiness’): the album’s title both misleads and explains everything. The happiness that these two musicians mean has nothing to do with flamboyant cheerfulness.
It is a serene form of joy that is being invented here.
The outlines of this happiness were sketched in 2003 in Stuttgart, Germany, when singer Laura López Castro and guitarist, composer and producer Don Philippe met for their first musical exchange. She, a vivacious acting student with Spanish parents and a weakness for Björk and Kyuss, and he a reserved urbane forty-something with French roots, co-founder of German hip-hop band Freundeskreis and owner of an exquisite collection of Jazz and Bossa Nova LPs.
At first the two found themselves re-interpreting Bossa Nova classics, fascinated by the way the Brazilian masters created their lightly worn melancholy. It is this mix of super-cooled elegance and blazing sensuality in Bossa Nova, but also the harmony of the music from the Spanish-speaking countries of South America, that Laura López Castro and Don Philippe were tracing at first. Before long, though, their music developed its own life. Pieces from João Gilberto, Tom Jobim or Atahualpa Yupanqui began to be replaced by their own compositions, and their sound enhanced with elements of Jazz, oriental or classical music. Laura took to singing more and more in Spanish, her mother tongue.
In 2005 they both moved to Berlin where they continued their musical essays, finding that Philippe’s kitchen had ideal acoustics for their meetings. Their first album Mi Libro Abierto appeared in spring 2006, establishing itself as a small milestone of soulful acoustic music. Twenty-thousand people bought copies of it. Extensive tours followed, including an acclaimed European tour together with Stuart A. Staples, singer of the British band Tindersticks.
Laura López Castro’s second album takes up the story where her first chimed out, although this time more confidence and many more little flourishes are audible. Most of the pieces are original compositions. But the repertoire also includes almost forgotten treasures of music history - songs dreamt up in the shady places of sunnier continents and now distilled by these two, down the essence of their original beauty. Listen to the full-blooded Bolero Tu me acostumbraste, created by the Cuban Frank Dominguez to express the bitter aftertaste that escorts every passion. Or the carefree Acabou Chorare by the Brazilian hippie collective Os Novos Baianos – a delightful ode to the little wonders of nature to which the young Bebel Gilberto once danced when she and her father João Gilberto visited the band’s shaggy commune in the early 1970s.
“I’ve come to have the same feeling about the cover versions as I do about our own songs,” says Don Philippe. When Laura López Castro speaks about the pieces they have borrowed it is clear that they have not been selected on a whim but because of love affairs stretching back over years.
To write her own lyrics Laura retreated to Tarifa, a city in the farthest south of Spain known as the world’s end until the discovery of the Americas. “A melancholic town, she explains, during Franco’s times the ‘crazy ones’ were sent down there. It is on a headland, encircled by a great wall and two seas with an inhospitable wind blowing across it the whole time.” It is a natural environment to inspire lyrics about the perpetual search for love or its impossibility. She and Don Philippe then set them to music: songs like the bluesy Búscame (‘Looking for Me’), a confession on the realisation of happiness by not swimming with the current, or the simultaneously thoughtful yet surging Hasta que vuelvas (‘Until You Return’), a comforting promise to a past love that has probably played itself out – these songs already convince as little classics before they have even established themselves.
Vocal and guitar: this is the duet that accomplishes most of the songs. At first the strumming just sounds like an accompaniment until you realise you are floating on a multitude of strokes and feints. All the while there is Laura’s beguiling voice, dispensing with studied pathos and yet somehow managing to embody a stirring intensity.
From time to time there is the slinky complement of a nimble string-quartet (arranged by Sebastian Studnitzky), a double bass (Paul Kleber/ Christoph Sauer) or the satisfied sigh of a Jazz trumpet (Sebastian Studnitzky/ Daniel A. Oberto) but even these few guests only appear long enough to tease and excite. This is all that is needed for a completeness of harmony to unfold.
Laura López Castro and Don Philippe have not only brought their own conception of happiness into the world, but also an album of ageless songs that achieves the suspense of simultaneous melancholy and comfort. These songs, in their bittersweet beauty, do usher you to happiness.
Ane Hebeisen
translated by Gabriel Fawcett
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|  | | | MI AMOR LLEVA UNA ESPINA | | Single | | NESOLA | | 06-02-24 | |
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